


"Living the Dream" by existentialExternality

by lucidChthonia (liquidCitrus)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Essay, Gen, Replay Value AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-25
Updated: 2012-11-25
Packaged: 2017-11-19 11:10:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/572619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/lucidChthonia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You've always had the kernel of potential for art in you the entire time. Really, everyone has that kernel of potential, most people just stop watering it after they turn ten and decide crayons break too easily and coloring pages are for babies.</i>
</p><p>Words of advice for artists. Written within the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/340777/chapters/551606">Replay Value</a> universe, though draws on a minimum of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Living the Dream" by existentialExternality

**Author's Note:**

> You don't need to be strictly familiar with the universe to read this, but you do need to know three things:
> 
> 1) This is a 'verse in which Dreams is a possible Aspect to roll (ie Witch of Dreams, Prince of Dreams). Dreams abilities manifest largely as glass and/or Tron lines.
> 
> 2) Aspects challenge the player to grow into the role they were intended for, as it is something they do not naturally do but they (ostensibly) need in their life. This goes several times over for the "native" (first) aspect someone rolls.
> 
> 3) The players of Sburb in question are required to "replay" the game. If you want more details of such, read the [parent work](http://archiveofourown.org/works/340777/chapters/551606), though it's mostly a handwave to explain the existence of Sburb veterans who've rolled the same aspect more than once.
> 
> If you _are_ familiar with the universe, this is an old Transamphibian essay.

[essay] **Living the Dream**  
 _by existentialExternality_

\----

This is not going to be poetic. I am not a writer, or a poet, unlike some of my Dreams fellows. I also don't give a flying glass shit about how I come across, so long as my point is made adequately.

That the way you think about Dreams is critical to your success is well known. That's what Sburb expects of everyone, Dreams or otherwise. But more to the point, there's a lot of misinformation about how you play Dreams. So I decided to fix that.

\----

I: You are now an artist.

You've always had the kernel of potential for art in you the entire time. Really, everyone has that kernel of potential, most people just stop watering it after they turn ten and decide crayons break too easily and coloring pages are for babies.

Or you pretended to go on with art, forcing yourself to go through motions to precisely emulate someone else's style or read sheet music with great precision, without really caring. You may have hated your mother's forcing you to go to bassoon lessons every week and practice every day. Or the weekend oil painting excursions to cabins in the woods with a backpack half full of paint, and no running water or electricity.

Or you might've had the opportunity and the drive, but failed spectacularly, and now you don't ever want to try again. Like the time it was your turn to GM and you were running a campaign out of the huge sheaf of photocopies you'd taken from an older sibling's gamebook, and the people playing it decided to do something completely different from anything the book said. And you had no idea what you were supposed to do after that, and you're pretty sure everyone else in the room will say you broke down in tears and ran, but you don't know because you never went there again.

Or, if none of that applies, you think you know what you're doing, but you really don't. Incidentally, Dunning-Kruger is a bitch.

It's at least one of those. It always is.

\----

II: Constraints make you creative.

Dreams, unlike Rain, is the aspect of making shit up _under constraints_. And the constraints aren't there just to get on your nerves. They're intended to make you more creative.

If I hand you a blank piece of paper and tell you to draw something, you're going to stare at me blankly. Everyone does. "Anything?" "Yes, _anything_ , what do you think?" "Should I draw the fruit or the landscape or your face?" "I don't know. I don't care. Just draw something."

Yeah, that's not going to work. That's pretty obvious. You freeze up because there's way too many choices and chances, and no good way of picking which one would be best to follow. The same thing happens in a supermarket, when you have only about fifty-five different varieties of canned vegetables and two dollars to spend on them and no idea how any of them taste because you don't recognize the brand.

Dreams abilities are going to hand you the blank page of paper. Your job is to figure out how you're going to specialize in using it.

So the best way to start out is by making up bullshit restrictions to add to your own powers. For example, you aren't just going to manifest "a thing", you're going to manifest "something that is heavy and can be dropped but that I haven't seen in a cartoon".

This is like me taking the piece of paper and scribbling three lines and a circle on it. Now it might look like something. Now you have something to start with. And yeah, the answer's going to depend on what was in your head already: maybe it looks like a setting sun behind mountains, or maybe that's exactly how the lens and hinge of your sister's glasses looked. I don't know. I don't care. Just start with something.

\----

III: On being "original" and why originality is complete bullshit.

I think the biggest mistake of most Dreams players, even the ones with a reroll or two completed, is that they think that originality is the be-all and end-all of being a Dreams player.

But, in that case, if you don't remember that you once dropped a giant rubber mallet on an imp's head somewhere in a strife in a Tribal Ebonpyre in your first session while playing through the maturity quest sequences, why can you still drop the same damn rubber mallet five or six years later once you don't remember doing it the first time, on your fourth reroll?

Answer: The "originality" thing is the game's answer to the idea of a Bullshit Restriction To Make You More Creative, like I outlined above. And it's pretty damn effective. If you're rolling Dreams once or twice, because you need it to spice up your life, you can go ahead and stop here. You won't run out of ideas. In fact, you probably should stop reading now, because I'm probably going to ruin your perception of reality forever in a few moments.

But if you're going to make a _career_ out of Dreaming?

It's not going to be enough to be original, because if you obsess too much about original, you're never really going to be able to make the awesome things you've always _dreamed_ about. (Stop rolling your eyes.) At some point, you have to stop giving a fuck.

Let's go back to the three lines and a circle. You have a concept of a "line". You have a concept of a "circle". You also have a concept of "sun" and "mountains" and "this looks like it could be the face of my fursona, if you take these lines to be whiskers". These are things that _already existed in your head_ , just like the twelve-tone scale of Western music and the concept of a language that I am writing and you are reading this in that conveys information.

So, in this sense, _nothing is original_.

I know. This probably would've killed my ability to cast for several days if I'd come to that realization during a Dreams session. Probably I've guaranteed you at least a few hours of helpless contemplation just by saying this.

But then I decided one day that I wanted to make something that makes myself and other people feel good. Once you stop giving a fuck about being original, and start thinking that you want to _do_ with your art, you realize that your search for originality was just another bullshit restriction you put on yourself to make you more creative, and you end up angling closer to what you always wanted to do with art all along.

It's at this point that you realize that modern art is someone's desperate attempt at being original. And, more to the point, being so original that they're not really doing anything cool anymore. Just fishing egg cartons out of the trash and supergluing them to a hide of a cow purchased on discount from IKEA and saying it symbolizes something, when everyone - including the artist - knows full well there's no such thing.

It's a good thing we don't have that kind of circlejerk out here.

\----

IV: The intimate, STD-ridden relationship between your art and your life.

Histories tell of one Emily Dickinson who was apparently agoraphobic enough to not bother setting foot out of doors and wrote poetry that's apparently still famous. Even here, where there are no professors anymore. So you know it's at least not _terrible_. There are a lot of people like that. Bipolar writers and schizophrenic painters and, above all, depressive creators of _every possible art form_.

And then there's the stereotypical emo kid writing poetry about how life is all suffering in a black notebook with a black pen while wearing a black sweater. (Actually, that's one possible reason why the lyrics of _O Fortuna_ are the way they are: an angsty Roman kid in, let's say, a black toga, writing a song about how nothing ever goes his way so nothing can ever go anyone's.)

What's the difference?

Maybe there is none. I don't actually know the answer to the question I'm asking. (See, this is how you know I'm a Sage. I don't issue bullshit proclamations and expect people to take them at face value. If I make you think, so much the better. But that's a digression.) But I do have at least an inkling.

It's like Flow players. Sometimes you're feeling the rhythm (if you will) of your work, and you're chest-deep in inspiration and energy, and you never want to stop. Sometimes you're just... not. And somehow you think this reflects on you, because if you're ever going to _do anything_ with your art, shouldn't you be able to be _professional_ about it?

No. No, it doesn't. Inspiration may as well be a spring deep in the earth, and sometimes it's going to come up clear and fresh, and sometimes it's going to come up as slime that you have to dig out and throw away. Feel an idea and let it drive you, but make sure you leave some idiot work for when you're really _not_ feeling it. Like, say, anatomy and perspective exercises, and redlining old work in preparation for redrawing it, or sewing all five thousand seed beads along the lower edge of a dress.

Ideas are generated by your subconscious, by smashing up pieces of everything you've ever seen and heard and experienced. This isn't a continuous process. It _can't_ be, because it's working whenever you're not thinking about something, which is of course never while you're actually drawing on your pool of inspiration.

Your subconscious also doesn't work when you've gotten nine hours of sleep in three days because you've been keeping watch to make sure that your fucking idiot breath player isn't going to kill anyone just because he ate a bottle's worth of caffeine pills. It's best to at least make a cursory attempt to keep your body functioning well, because your mind's there to follow.

Likewise, GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. If you want to draw people, you need to be looking at the way people are put together, not anime. If you like drawing landscapes, the best thing for it is to keep a close eye out for how the lights and shadows act and interact, not attempting to draw just flat areas of color and then complaining about how your lineart isn't good enough. If you want to write interesting things, read things you think are interesting, and then pay attention to the structure and the tricks, don't just read things you think are boring because someone once told you they were Good Art.

This also means that if your life is hell, your art is going to tend towards depicting life as hell. Sometimes, it's a good thing, because expressing yourself helps process things that happened once. (What else would wall-scribbles be for?) But if you end up thinking that all Good Art should have angst and resentment about the meaninglessness of life, you're going to end up imbibing those characteristics yourself, and that's going to turn you into a horrible person.

So don't do that, either.

\----

V: No, you're not good enough and you probably never will be, at least in your eyes.

Here's the last non-secret about artists: We all hate our art because that's how we improve.

You know what looks good when you see it. And as you learn more, you have more and more discriminating standards about what looks good and what you should be doing. And frankly your recognition of what looks good? Tends to make it so that when you're looking at what you've been doing all this time, it's not good _enough_.

It's why so many artists, if they're in the trade voluntarily, give up so early: They know what they want to look like, they practice some, they work on their eyes and their pencils don't quite keep pace, and then they look at what they've done and it seems like a creepingly slow progression from "this is horrible" to "this is just barely all right", with all the masters' work hung up above in seemingly unreachable alcoves.

No. They're not unreachable. Look down the damn ladder. Your favorite author almost certainly started out writing shitty self-insert fanfiction. I started out drawing fucking stick figures on the back of a napkin one day. Putting people on pedestals is terrible for them and terrible for you, because pedestals don't have handholds.

If you assume you'll never be able to get good, that's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Your job is to figure out how to make your pencil catch up to your eye in skill and proficiency. And the only way there is to put in your Skaiadamn ten thousand hours of focused practice, and the only way to do _that_ is to make sure you are studying the way your art is put together every single day.

There's no shortcuts.

Sorry.

**Author's Note:**

> One of the first things I did when I started seriously wondering if I'd be able to seriously pursue [my music](http://soundcloud.com/hesperidia) was research what everyone wishes they'd said to their past self as they began doing significant work towards Being an Artist. (It's stuff that's been rattling around in my head for a while, so it's not all sourced properly, though I'd recommend Paul Graham's essay "[Taste for Makers](http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html)".)
> 
> And then I channeled my inner Cracked writer.
> 
> That's really all that happened.


End file.
